The Dark Side: Security Concerns in Machine Learning for EDA

The growing IC complexity has led to a compelling need for design efficiency improvement through new electronic design automation (EDA) methodologies. In recent years, many unprecedented efficient EDA methods have been enabled by ML techniques. While ML demonstrates its great potential in circuit design, however, the dark side about security problems, is seldomly discussed. This paper gives a comprehensive and impartial summary of all security concerns we have observed in ML for EDA. Many of them are hidden or neglected by practitioners in this field. In this paper, we first provide our taxonomy to define four major types of security concerns, then we analyze different application scenarios and special properties in ML for EDA. After that, we present our detailed analysis of each security concern with experiments.